China’s ‘Great Cannon’ Expands Web Tampering Abilities, Group Says

China may have developed an offensive cyber tool that it could redirect massive amounts of electronic traffic to a specific website and cripple it, says Citizen Lab.

Daniel Acker/Bloomberg News

A recent cyberattack on a U.S. coding website suggests China has broader capabilities to tamper with global web traffic than previously recognized, a new report said. As the WSJ's Eva Dou reports:

Toronto-based human rights research group Citizen Lab said Friday the attack, widely believed to have come from China, showed the country has developed an offensive cyber tool that it could potentially use for a broad range of purposes, such as to send viruses to targeted individuals or intercept messages.

The tool essentially allows its users to redirect massive amounts of electronic traffic to a specific website or other destination on the Internet, crippling it. But the group on Friday said it could have other uses.

Citizen Lab dubbed China’s alleged new capabilities the “Great Cannon,” in contrast to the country’s long-standing passive Internet censorship filters, which are often called the Great Firewall. Citizen Lab, which is part of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, focuses on the intersection of digital media, security and human rights. Its researchers have been critical of China’s efforts to control online discourse at home.

The coding site GitHub was hit by an onslaught of traffic in late March redirected from users outside of China trying to reach China’s most popular search engine, which is run by U.S.-traded Baidu Inc. Security experts said the attack was likely to have been conducted by China’s authorities, as it required interception of Web traffic at a high level of the country’s Internet infrastructure.